It's almost a shame that the PCE is so filled with great shmups that well made ones like this fade into the background. Masaya certainly put in a good effort to make the mechanics stand out a little. Like between levels, you get a menu to pick a sub weapon. It looks like a shop, complete with prices, but really they're just a minimum score you have to have achieved to be able to select them. Why is this interesting? Because it's a dynamic difficulty adjustment. Since you keep your score when you continue, it means that you are allowed to try stages again and again with more and more powerful weapons each time until you can do it, but it doesn't feel like it's dumbing the game down for you. It's a bizarrely forward thinking move for a licensed game of this period. And those power ups are mostly unique and interesting. Like one of my favorites is this option that hovers above your ship and can rain shots in a downwards cone around and beneath your ship.

On the negative end, the enemies could use more variety. You'll see a lot of the same formations of the same enemies in just about every level. And there are a couple spots where it feels like a level has already shown me what it has to offer, but it keeps going simply because they wanted to extend the gameplay a bit. And the boss levels are a little jarring, since you suddenly shift into a humanoid robot that autofires and you now use the buttons to rotate ala Forgotten Worlds. The bosses aren't bad, but getting used to that gameplay mode is a little weird, and it feels like they're there more because they needed to fulfill the whole "transforming robot" part of the license than because it fit the game they were making.

Overall, this is a good shmup, but not a great one, which makes it a bit hard to recommend that highly on a system that has games like Gate of Thunder, Lords of Thunder, or Air Zonk. But if you've already gone through the more notable shmups on the console, give this one a try.